Category: Uncategorized

Last night’s Sugar Bowl left me torn between two extremes: Cheering for whoever plays against Ohio State (my usual position) and cheering for the Big Ten (very unpalatable when our representative is the Buckeyes). After watching the game into the third quarter, however, I decided the question was moot. There is no more mighty Big Ten to cheer for anymore, only a group of teams that tolerate cold weather and husky cheerleaders for the sure chance to head to a warm climate for a bowl game, where they invariably get mown down like a Dick Cheney quail.

What an absolutely crappy game Ohio State played. And what an absolutely predictable outcome. Any national ranking given to a Big Ten team now has the authentic ring of the valentines passed around school to every kid b/c no one should have their feelings hurt. Michigan starts out the season at #5, then loses to App State and Oregon? Illinois suffers a week of jet lag before laying down to USC? Ohio State violently chokes on two chances at the national championship? Pathetic.

The conference is the laughingstock of college football now. What was the conference’s bowl record? 3 and 6? Nine of eleven teams make it to bowl season? And finish with this record? We are the Gerry Cooneys of the college football world. How can any SEC or Pac-10 team even get excited about showing up for these things? No wonder the warm-weather conferences are pushing for a playoff system–they get tired of beating up the Big 10 and would prefer a challenge once in a while at the end of the season.

I don’t even know enough about football to make a decent argument or a useful insight here. I only know what I see during Christmas break, when I get the chance to watch a game or two. And I would suggest the conference disband and spend a few years in the wilderness, searching their souls like disgraced samurai, before they even think of showing up in the post-season again. It’s just too humiliating for alumni to watch.

My memory has been giving me trouble lately. I’d tell you how long it’s been coming up short, but I can’t even remember that. I’m talking about memories of events from my teens, twenties, thirties–basically everything up til maybe five years ago. I try to remember the details of a trip, or an old friend, or a club I used to visit a lot, and come up empty. At other times, people ask me, “Hey, remember the time…” and it sounds like they’re talking about someone else’s life. This incomplete history is especially troubling for me professionally–what’s a writer supposed to do, after all, except stitch together the fabric of old ideas and new experiences to elicit reactions in readers? At this rate, I’ll have to invent EVERYTHING I write, and not just the material that doesn’t jibe with the wild generalizations I’m making.

The last five weeks of the year, of course, are when memories become the part and parcel of all our activities. Whether embracing or running from one’s past, one can’t escape from the fact: the holiday season runs on memories. I took the family to Detroit for Thanksgiving to spend it with my mom and brother’s family. Memories good and bad sprung up constantly, all set against a background of a city I don’t recognize anymore.

This year my mom finally finished putting together a photo album for me, of childhood pictures when I was cute as a puppy’s navel to my teenage years when…words fail me. Let’s just say I wasn’t cute anymore. She included all my class group pictures from ol’ Sacred Heart Grade School on Michigan Avenue, even one from first grade. At first I could name off just about every other babyface in the collection…

Kathy O’Brien.
Charlotte Cook.
Art and Craig Champagne.
John Berchulc.

Then, an hour later, the names of the faces I’d missed started coming back to me…

Jeannie Youvon.
Sean Archer.
Bridget Ugorowski.
Bob Coy.
Gary Lesinski.

And for the next four days, names would come back to me. During the day. Middle of the night. In the middle of a conversation. Every single name, it seemed, was somewhere to be found in my neurons….

John Steslicki.
Mary Ann Mosey.
Carolyn Logue.
Lori Waldecker.
Paul Mercurio.

I haven’t tested myself against the eighth grade master photo I have packed away someplace. For more than a couple reasons, I’m scared to. With a couple of exceptions, I haven’t seen any of these people since Nixon was president, I only went on to high school with one of the 60, and I can’t really say I was friends with more than a handful. (That’s not to deny the bond that kids have in a parish school through the years.) It staggers me that the names keep bubbling up from the amber, when the rest of my memory is so balky, stubborn and incomplete. What an odd mechanism in the grey matter. How the hell does it get me through the day?

It will save us from a Very Special Thanksgiving edition of “Two and a Half Men.”

If you want to read two excellent articles about the reasons behind the writers strike, check out Chris Kelly at HuffPo, and Marshall Herskovitz (producer of thirtysomething and My So-Called Life) in the LA Times.

The Edmonton Swastikas, 1919. I’m betting sales of logo wear peaked some time ago.

Halloween is over now. Time to clean up the fake spiderwebs, put away the costumes and wigs, and prepare for the long slow slide to the end of the year.

The kids and I only managed to watch one movie in preparation, “Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein.” I don’t think it really counts, but we haven’t had many nights at home, and there haven’t been enough good movies on Turner Classics to put on the Tivo. “Bride of the Monster” is sitting on the machine now, but I don’t think I’ll subject anybody to that.

The Halloween entertainment I’m going to miss most, surprisingly, is a song anthology that I snatched off the internet last year. “Spook Party” mixed a lot of old rockabilly and novelty songs with radio ads for “It Conquered the World” and “The 4-D Man”. Every afternoon after school, the kids put it on the CD player and drove their mom crazy. But so many of them have stuck in my head that I’ll be hearing Screamin’ Jay Hawkins “Feast of the Mau-Maus” when we cut into the Thanksgiving turkey. You should all get the zip files for “Spook Party” and “Ghoul-Arama” for next year to fill your heart with creepy goodness. Go here for the files. And poke around the rest of the pages on the “Scar Stuff” blog, as you’ll find lots of strange gems.

Here’s my jack o’lantern for the year. I was pretty proud of the design, but I think next year I’ll have to let the head rot out a little more so the strings sewing the mouth shut really stand out. The problem in this neighborhood is that, no matter how much tasty garbage is overflowing in the dumpsters, the rabid squirrels feel obliged to rip apart pumpkins like wolverines going after mice. Put your pumpkin out three days before Halloween, and it will look like the Tasmanian Devil has gotten hold of it by the time the trick-or-treaters come out.

And to all the folks who decorate their houses with store-bought skeletons and blow-up ghosts, I gotta tell ya, a little ingenuity can go a long way. (Some chumbalone on my street bought little white baggies, preprinted with ghost faces, and stuffed them with a napkin or two and hung them in his tree. Store-bought, pre-printed ghost baggies? Now that’s lame.) This year I wrapped three bushes in my front yard with black nylon mesh and stuck some blinking glowing eyes inside. I wanted to make them look like large menacing blobs, kind of like that old Looney Tunes red-headed monster. The effect was okay, not great. But as a last minute inspiration, I grabbed our dog’s travel cage and some rubber monster claws from the costume bin, and made the decoration below.

People stopped and laughed at it, little kids looked at it very askance as they walked by (I can watch their expressions all day from my office on the **ahem** mezzanine level of the house). One man even took a picture of it, saying he was looking for ideas for next year. Just goes to show, a little creativity can go a long way. And it keeps the kids busy to boot.

If you want to see what our costumes were this year, visit my MySpace page.

Now, on with November. Sigh.

One that documents superhero shots to the groin. Kickings, fistings, stabbings, even explosions. I just dare you to resist the temptation to check out a site called “Nad-Shots.”

Seems to be a recurrent theme in “Planetary”, for some reason.

The weather has finally turned cold in Chicago, and the leaves on the trees outside my window are giving up the ghost and cascading to the sidewalk. They flutter down endlessly, like the confetti from a big party thrown for Summer, now that it’s finally gotten on the cruise liner and headed south. I hope we have a decently cold winter this year, so we can actually enjoy the snow and ice for long uninterrupted periods, and not have to endure these wet, filthy, warmish winters we’ve had lately. Maybe the past few tepid winters are what it’s like to have winter in Louisville or Cincinnati, where the season isn’t something to enjoy, but something to just muddle through. A tedious holding pattern.

Just enjoyed a few days with my mother visiting town. She came in to see the kids in their church choir musical and see some old friends, though there are becoming fewer in number than ever. That’s true both in Chicago where she grew up and in Detroit. Loneliness must be the worst thing about getting old.

These visits usually entail a few stories or facts that surprise me. First off, I should say that my family (save for my mother) is not one for small talk. It would be generous to say about my father, as she did, that he “kept his own counsel.” He basically kept his mouth shut to the point where a lot of people took offense, including my grandmother. At one point in my childhood, he famously objected to all the talking at the dinner table by asking in frustration, “What do you all think this is, a social event?”

So a visit with Mom always results in a few strange items coming to light, such as:

* My father had season tickets to see the Lions all through my childhood. I was the only son who was a sports fan, but I don’t remember him ever mentioning this, and I know for a fact I never went to a Lions game. Thanks, Dad.

* The neighbor kid, who was maybe two years older than me, would get very upset that I spoke gibberish as a toddler. My mother told him, “That’s not gibberish–he’s speaking Chinese.” The kid then grew very concerned for me, trying to make it in America and knowing only Chinese. Mom regrets pulling the kid’s chain, but he was such a dick, I’m glad she did it.

* Before my father was courted by and took a job with Ford Motor Co. in Dearborn, he got a job offer in Indianapolis, doing finance for some company there. They were brought down there and dined with the bosses of the company, but at 10:00 that night, they decided to get out of their hotel room and grab a drink somewhere downtown. In all of Downtown Naptown, they couldn’t find a single tavern or bar & grill open. Thank heavens for that. If he had taken a job down there, I might have grown up with an even more nasal accent than I have now.

At some point in the weekend, the subject of my brother the actor came up, as it always does. An actor’s life is a string of disappointments and near-misses, leavened occasionally with fun and fulfilling work. Of course, a mother doesn’t want to see her son have to go through so much rejection in his life, and she doesn’t like to hear stories about the strivers, backstabbers, egoists and connivers that compete with him for roles and attention.

“He’s not ‘on’ all the time, like most of them,” she said. “I don’t know if that would help, but he’s not like that. We don’t know what it’s like to be that passionate about something, that it commands your whole life. It’s just not in our nature.”

“Our” nature meaning the Garner family makeup. Mom of course projects her insecurities (of which there are many) onto the rest of the world, and her family is the closest target, but her statement got me thinking: Does everybody out there have a “family nature”? Does every family have an indelible, immutable, defining trait? Apparently the Garner family trait is reticence and a lack of passion, in her eyes. There were three sons in the family, and we all looked very similar. People often referred to us as “the Garner boys” and “definitely Bill’s sons,” and assumed we were all like Dad: studious, smart, reserved, hard-working.

Whenever anyone asks me where my sense of humor comes from, or the source of the hamminess of my kids, my nieces and nephews, and my brother and myself, I never have an answer. I just know it didn’t come from my parents, and that our household wasn’t one of those loud, crazy Irish households where everyone was vying for attention. We were the British model that kept everything buttoned down until the seams burst. Still, that may be a formula for producing people like yours truly. If they’d sent me away to boarding school, I might have turned into a truly twisted genius.

The last of the original Rat Pack passed away yesterday, at the age of 89. Hammer another nail into the coffin of pre-hippie sixties cool, now only remembered in tribute acts and strained journalistic references to current flashes in the entertainment pan. And “Mad Men”, I guess, though I haven’t watched it yet.

What a year it’s been. Is there anyone left alive who sat on Johnny Carson’s couch when “The Tonight Show” was still based in NYC?

UPDATE: For an interesting historical perspective on the Rat Pack, and a clip from The Joey Bishop Show, check out this link to Crooks & Liars.

I’d like to thank my niece for pointing out that I am a man ahead of my time. Among my many far-sighted obsessions (the mayonnaise glue stick applicator, for one), I have been chronicling the controversies surrounding the state of the beanbag in recent weeks. You can read the posts here and here if you have so little to do today.

Well, my niece points out that Newsweek is reporting a new controversy over nomenclature among tailgating afficianadoes. Ever alert for the latest trend that affects our lives, the magazine states that there now exists a fight brewing about the proper name for this new generation of steroidal beanbag toss games. The contenders? Cornhole and Baggo.

Remember when George Carlin catalogued the “7 Words You Can’t Say on Television”? While that list is not completely taboo anymore, I’m betting that the words “cornhole” and “baggo” can’t be used in the same paragraph on TV without getting the FCC worked up. Let me rephrase that: I’m HOPING those two words can’t be used together. Of course, I’m probably wrong. There’s probably a cop show in development for FX named “Cornhole and Baggo.”

And did you know that there was something called the American Cornhole Association? Aren’t you glad now that you do?

All this past week, for some reason, the tune that was in my head when I woke up was:

Queen’s “Death on Two Legs”

But today, there was a change in programming, and a little slide guitar was added to the playlist

Faces: “That’s All You Need”

And is it any wonder I’ve been more groovin and less disjointed today? Yeesh. How can I make it happen every day? At least it wasn’t “Fishin Wit Fred” by Da Yoopers.

Number One Son has always been awkward in social situations. Talks too long, doesn’t read body language, only declaims on the topics in which he himself is interested, etc. It’s caused some consternation over the years, and worry and frustration, because, of course, I’d like to live his life for him to save him any hard lessons, and I’ve been a social wizard since I was 10 days old, y’see. As adolescence looms, my worries about his future social agony loom so large that I sometimes don’t even notice them anymore, as they fade into the background like traffic noise.

So today was the first day for Liam to have cello lessons at school (which of course he fought, but that’s another story). He needed to carry my wife’s cello in its heavy old case three blocks to school. As I walked the dog a discrete half-block behind him, I saw he was struggling with getting the grip. Every 20 feet, he stopped, got a different grip, and hobbled on his way. I worried about the continued health of the instrument, and his having to look like a beleaguered music geek on a tough city street.

Then, one of his classmates gained on him on the sidewalk and approached him. A girl. They acknowledged one another and started to walk to school together, sort of, nothing serious please. And what do you know? He carried that cello in one hand by his side like it was a ukulele.

It was cheering to witness this small attempt to impress someone of the opposite sex. Maybe he’ll manage to fit in sometime after all.

No, I’m not talking about Larry Craig.

I’ve already squawked about the near-ubiquitous beanbag setups, but in that article, I quoted the wrong price for a custom-made Chicago Bears Cornhole game at a Lincoln Square boutique.

It wasn’t $65.

It was $210.

We are ALL in the wrong business.

Last night I dreamed I was playing poker with Stephen Colbert, and we were using pieces of fried chicken skin as our currency. I think this means a major appliance in my house is going to go on the fritz soon.

With their parents out of town for a week, some boys in Lombard, Ill., decided to put their empty backyard to use, and built a 60-foot waterslide off the back of their house. If that sounds as dangerous as it does awesome to you, check out the video by clicking here.

For once, a video of teenagers doing reckless things on the web that doesn’t result in massive injuries.

Via Gaper’s Block.